2011 August

We thank each and every one of you who submitted a design and participated in the voting process. Three winning designs were chosen based on popular vote and by a panel of judges from our CC Poland team (with a little help from other international affiliates).

Each poster will be printed and featured prominently at the lovely Primates Palace in Warsaw for our Global Summit, to be held from September 16-18. The posters will also be displayed as part of a digital CC visual arts exhibit at the venue.

Congratulations to the designers, and thanks to all of you who participated!

Last week in New Zealand, the Ministers of Finance and Internal Affairs adopted a statement detailing a new Declaration on Open and Transparent Government. The Declaration has been approved by Cabinet, and directs all Public Service departments, the New Zealand Police, the New Zealand Defence Force, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service; encourages other State Services agencies; and invites State Sector agencies to commit to releasing high value public data actively for re-use, in accordance with the Declaration and Principles, and in accordance with the NZGOAL Review and Release process. More information on this statement can be found at the CC Aotearoa New Zealand blog.

This follows the release in June and July of websites for Open Access and Licensing Frameworks by both the New Zealand and Australian governments.

NZGOAL, the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing Framework, is administered by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand, and is a guide for those using the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing Framework, which “recommends the Creative Commons BY licence as a default licence when releasing government held content and data for reuse.” NZGOAL is under a default CC BY license. Success stories of implementation via this framework are documented at opendatastories.org.

Meanwhile, AusGOAL, the Australian Governments Open Access and Licensing Framework is nationally endorsed and administered by the Cross-Jurisdictional Chief Information Officers Committee, and “provides support and guidance to government and related sectors to facilitate open access to publicly funded information.” AusGOAL is also under a default CC BY license, while recommending the suite of CC licenses for copyrighted material and the CC Public Domain Mark for non-copyrighted material.

Much of this has already been roughly documented on our wiki page, Government use of Creative Commons. Please feel free to add to this page any missing use cases or details as they come up.

Lastly, we would like to leave you with another relatively recent development by CC New Zealand — this fun animation video explaining the CC licenses called, Creative Commons Kiwi.

The Moore Foundation has called for community feedback on where to invest in the area of data-intensive science. We’ve submitted our own idea — data governance — and would love your feedback and support for the idea. We have been exploring data governance issues, including data licensing, since 2004 in our science work, and we’re planning to make data governance a priority across the Creative Commons organization going forward.

Data governance is more than just licensing. It’s the system of decision rights and accountabilities for data-related processes that describe who can take what actions with what information, and when, under what circumstances and using what methods. Our work on the Neurocommons project — using web standards to mark up copyright licenses and developing technological infrastructure to make the commons searchable and usable — all inform our ideas on data governance.

We are actively planning for a major project in data in 2012, and look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas. Please register and vote, and not just on our idea — participation in processes like this is a great way to increase their usage by foundations in making funding choices that can benefit the commons.

For a while now, government data for the City of Vienna has been open for reuse under the CC Attribution license. In a more national effort, the City of Vienna, along with the Chancellor’s Office and the Austrian cities of Linz, Salzburg and Graz, recently coordinated their activities to establish the Cooperation OGD (Open Government Data) Austria. The cooperation aims to “to forge common standards and develop conditions in which OGD can flourish to the benefit of all stakeholders.” In its first session, the group agreed to eight key points, which were reported at the Linz Open Commons blog. The first key point was also highlighted over at the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) blog in English:

“All public administration will be free under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), meaning it can be reused and shared for any purpose, with only attribution necessary.”

This is great news for Austrian PSI and open government in general. By using CC licenses and tools to communicate broad reuse rights to the content, data, and educational materials they create, governments are stimulating economic growth, promoting citizen engagement, and increasing the transparency of government resources and services.

We will be running several sessions on government data and PSI at the CC Global Summit in Warsaw speaking to these themes and engaging CC affiliates and community from around the world. One month after the summit, the OKF will also host Open Government Data Camp 2011 in Warsaw (now open for registration). Don’t worry if you can’t make it to either event, as we will be providing updates to both on our blog. In the meantime, you can find many more examples of CC use in government at creativecommons.org/government.

We had a wonderful response from the Call for Participation in the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) Technical Working Group with highly qualified individuals and representatives from many leading organizations in the education field. (As you may recall, LRMI is a project led by Creative Commons and the Association of Educational Publishers to establish a common vocabulary for describing learning resources.) After consultation with the LRMI project partners, we needed to balance all the restrictions of an efficient, productive, and representative working group along with the large numbers of qualified potential members.

The first meeting of the Working Group will be a teleconference this Wednesday (August 17th). To follow along with the progress of the group, there is a public timeline and mailing list that anyone can join.

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We are thrilled to announce the 2011 Creative Commons Global Summit, now open for registration! The Creative Commons Global Summit will take place over three full days from September 16-18, and is generously hosted by our affiliates at CC Poland. The summit will bring together the CC community in Warsaw, Poland, to engage strategically on the future of our shared commons, to renew and further build CC’s vital community, to collaborate on mutual projects and initiatives, and to celebrate our successes as we head towards the end of our first decade together. For more information, and to register, head on over to the Global Summit wiki.

New Creative Commons Regional Managers

Instrumental in planning for the Global Summit are our new Regional Managers. New hires Jonas Öberg (Europe), Carolina Botero and Claudio Ruiz (Co-Managers, Latin America) will join existing CC staffers Chiaki Hayashi (Asia and the Pacific), Donatella della Ratta (Arab World), Aurelia J. Schultz (Africa), and our new Network Affiliate Coordinator, Jessica Coates, to form a new team dedicated to supporting our Affiliate Network worldwide. Adding staff support for our affiliates is part of a broader strategy CC is currently implementing to enhance the role and profile of the Affiliate Network. The Regional Managers will be dedicated to supporting and working with these local affiliates, while also working together to inform and shape CC’s ongoing development and policy making. Read more.

Design the winning poster for the Global Summit!

Some of our CC affiliates in Asia are hosting a poster design competition for the summit, based on the theme, “Powering an Open Future.” The winning designs (judged by an international panel and by popular vote) will be introduced at the Global Summit with people in attendance from all over the world, featured prominently at the venue and also as part of a CC visual arts exhibit. The designer will receive a gift of the printed poster from a professional publishing company in Warsaw. The deadline is August 22, Japan time, and in less than two weeks! For the complete submission rules and to enter, visit the competition site.

The Creative Commons Global Summit will take place over three full days from September 16-18 in Warsaw, Poland, and is generously hosted by our affiliates at CC Poland.

The theme of this year’s Summit is “Powering an Open Future.” As Creative Commons enters its second decade, prominent thinkers from the commons movement worldwide, including Sir John Daniels from the Commonwealth of Learning, Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Foundations, CC board member Lawrence Lessig, and CC CEO Cathy Casserly, will come together with experts from our global Affiliate Network, CC staff, and key stakeholders to consider “what next”?

Central to the Summit will be a day-long CC Festival on Saturday, September 17th. This public day will feature a variety of panels, workshops, plenary speakers and a CC visual arts exhibition, showcasing the best of the commons now and in the future. It will include sessions focused on key areas of interest to the commons community worldwide, including education, science, government, data, business and the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector. Most excitingly, it will be followed in the evening by a CC Salon, a musical celebration of creativity, remix, and openness.

The Global Summit will also serve as a major meeting and planning forum for the CC community itself, with regional meetings, legal debates, community planning, training workshops, and general discussion and strategizing on the big issues for the next ten years of CC, including the new version 4.0 licenses and supporting and enhancing the Affiliate Network worldwide. The CC Board of Directors will be joining us at the Summit, specifically to meet with the community and engage in these broader discussions.

The Creative Commons Global Summit will be a chance for the whole commons community to communicate, celebrate and connect. We hope you can join us.

For more information, and to register, head on over to the Global Summit wiki. The 2011 Creative Commons Global Summit is a free event, but registration is required.

You may have heard about the Creative Commons Global Summit to be held in Warsaw, Poland this September. In the lead up to its public launch later this week, we want you, our community, to get involved!

Some of our CC affiliates in Asia are hosting a poster design competition for the summit, based on the theme, “Powering an Open Future.”

From the website,

The Creative Commons Global Summit 2011 provides an opportunity for volunteers, industry leaders and practitioners of the worldwide open content licensing movement to explore and showcase the past, present and future of Creative Commons, copyright and free culture. It will be an event focused on sharing, openness and collaboration, with an eye towards setting the path for the Creative Commons community over its next 10 years.

The winning designs (judged by an international panel and by popular vote) will be introduced at the Global Summit with people in attendance from all over the world, featured prominently at the venue and also as part of a CC visual arts exhibit. The designer will receive a gift of the printed poster from a professional publishing company in Warsaw.

All submissions must be licensed under the CC BY license and incorporate the CC Global Summit logo (see above for what that looks like). For the complete submission rules and to enter, visit the competition site. (In the case you are not fluent in Japanese, you can change the language to English in the upper right hand corner.)

The deadline is August 22 (Japan time & in less than two weeks!), so we look forward to seeing your creativity in action!

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We’re pleased to see the launch of The Public Domain Review. The Review is a website with weekly updates in which scholars, writers, artists, librarians and others present an interesting or curious work (including films, photographs, texts and audio) from the public domain and write short accompanying articles about it that provide background, context, history, or other commentary or criticism. There are already several articles up on the site. The Review is also accepting submissions.

The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into the whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well known.

Congratulations to editors Adam Green and Jonathan Gray on launching this fascinating site that will share and celebrate the vast wonders of the public domain! You can sign up for updates, or follow on Twitter.

This year the third Arab regional meeting of Creative Commons (30th June-2nd July, Tunis) proved extraordinary, in keeping with prior gatherings in the region. Co-organized with Tunisian blogging platform Nawaat and sponsored by the Al Jazeera network, the event garnered CC volunteers from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, UAE, Qatar, Iraq, Tunisia and, for the first time, welcomed three people from the Gaza strip—bloggers Bashar Lubbad and Nalan Sarraj and rapper Ayman Mghamis—who joined to contribute to two days of workshops focused on creativity, remixing and peer-production.

CC Arab community members Mahmoud Abu-Wardeh, Stephanie Terroir, Eman Jaradat, Darine Sabbagh, Pierre el Khoury, Issa Mahasneh, Kanaan Manasrah, Bassam Ali, and Bilal Randeree designed and led a variety of workshops on visual art, creative remix, open education, law, citizen journalism, and social media targeted to designers, bloggers, educators, lawyers and civil society members coming from Tunis and other Tunisian municipalities. All workshops were characterized by an emphasis on openness. In particular, a track devoted to the use of “open source tools for creative production” – led by Mahmoud and Stephanie from CC UAE team – showed the Tunisian workshop participants how to produce videos, cartoons and graphics by using exclusively open source software. The results of this workshop are the Visuals and video projections that have been projected during the final closing event of July 2nd.

Two full days of hands-on workshops were held at the Golden Tulip hotel in Tunis, in addition to two plenary sessions to discuss the future of CC in the Arab region with the presence of CC Chairman and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. Al Jazeera`s Head of New Media, Mooed Ahmed, introduced the Creative Commons Al Jazeera repository and a number of other open projects initiated by the Qatari-based network, while Nawaat`s Sami Ben Gharbeia, Malek Khradhraoui and Riadh Guerfali spoke passionately about the role of bloggers and activists during the Tunisian revolution that ended the rule of President Ben Ali last January.

Oussama Barkia and Fedi Fedi from Kharabeesh delighted everybody with a screening of their CC BY-NC-ND-licensed web cartoons that mock Arab dictators, an example of the new Arab creativity that is no longer bounded by a fear of expressing thoughts and ideas freely.

The “grand finale” was truly a celebration of Arab creativity and of Arab youth who, during 2011, were able to seize their future and reinvent it. Since the events in the region had their starting point in Tunis, the celebration was also an homage to the Tunisian people, particularly the youth. On the 2nd of July, Tunisian and Arab artists — among them, Armada Bizerta, Lak3y, Yram, Aliaa, Badiaa Bouhrizi, Barbaroots, Yasser Shoukry — gathered at the stunning venue of Ennajma Ezzahra in Sidi Bou Said, Tunis to play music together in a concert which has been renamed “Sharing the Spring”, in reference to the “Arab spring”, a movement of change which has been spread all across the Arab world after the Tunisian revolution.

The concert was also an homage to the sharing culture that CC, together with many organizations and civil society activists, has contributed to spread out in the Region. During the CC regional meeting, musicians Mark Levine and Reda Zine conducted a music workshop with Tunisian and Arab artists, the results of which being two songs — “Mamnou3” (Forbidden) and “Thawra mustamirra” (Ongoing revolution) — entirely written and performed by its participants, musicians from a variety of Arab countries and music backgrounds, from heavy metal to rap to folk to classical Arab music. The artists are now working to produce the two original tracks and distribute them on a CD and on the Internet under a CC BY NC license.